Jeremy Scahill, best known for his book about the LLC formerly known as Blackwater, did a prescient interview on Fresh Air four days before the 21 May attack in Sana'a. I know a lot of people write him off because of his politics (he’s quite the lefty), but as someone who has a real respect for investigative journalism he seems to me to know a lot more about how and why the sausage is made than most contemporary members of the Fourth Estate.

When the Fresh Air host puts the “Well, what would you have us do about AQAP?” question to Scahill his reply amounts to 1) stop acting as if al-Qaeda is an existential threat to the United States 2) stop outsourcing our HUMINT to the Saudis and 3) stop pretending more and better technology can obviate HUMINT. However his politics may shade what is presented in the interview, I found the discussion beginning at 41:49 of the role which attending khat chews played in his reporting to be indicative of a real respect for the sort of work that absolutely has to be done in investigative journalism, ethnographic fieldwork, or intelligence gathering worth calling such. And in the excerpt below he throws out an observation which in my experience is quite indicative of the lack of respect American foreign policy types have for that sort of work.

And I would not have gotten access to the places I went, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to the people that I did, I wouldn’t have been able to travel as freely as I did in Yemen if I wasn’t going to those khat chews and negotiating permissions or talking to people and listening to them. And the reason that I’m so struck by that experience is because the United States bans its employees in Yemen from chewing khat.